"How Our Pursuit of Happiness is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks"

Reading America the Anxious, I'm intrigued to see America through the eyes of the author.  As a "cynical Brit," Ruth Whippman regards America's "pursuit of happiness" through skeptical eyes, trying out--for one thing--a happiness seminar that promises "personal transformation."

I'm reminded of some of the New Age events I attended in the Seventies.  We had New Age food, New Age prophets and gurus, and whole bookstores devoted to New Age Thought.

Crystals, psychic readings, alfalfa sprouts, a"Question Authority" bumper sticker,  yoga, protests,  Tree Huggers, Circle Dances and the East-West Journal advocating macrobiotic eating--all these were part of the New Age phenomenon.

For the sake of her research for the book, Ruth grudgingly gives up three days of potential happiness with her baby and husband to join happiness seekers for an intense and structured weekend event designed to increase the happiness of those willing to reveal their deepest and darkest secrets to the rest of them.

Her account of the weekend reminded me of a one-night "Human Potential" workshop a friend and I attended years go.  The leader was a charismatic speaker (there were many of these self-proclaimed gurus in the 70s) and she had many followers.  We were curious.

At one point, the leader had the participants "whisper compliments in each others' ears," even though we'd never met each other.  I can't recall the purpose of this exercise, just that it was a terribly awkward forced intimacy with strangers.  Then she directed the participants to crawl on the ground like animals to the beat of music.  I believe the point was to replicate various stages of evolution, to have the crawlers "get in touch with" earlier  species--but I'm not sure.  When the crawling began, my friend and I went outside for a smoke and returned only after the crawlers had evolved back to humans.

When I first moved to Texas, I attended a "Bible study" at San Antonio College--and got to see my first (and last) "speaking in tongues."  People stood up and said things that were presumably utterances in other languages, though they didn't understand the words and neither did anyone else.  After the first person started, soon everyone (everyone but me, who didn't "have the gift") was speaking in tongues all at once, louder and louder, until it reached a crescendo and stopped.

It may have been a kind of group hysteria for all I know--but at the age of 18, I was impressed by the drama of it all and tried out some faux African dialects in the car on the way home, to no avail.

There have been so many paths to happiness that you'd think America would be universally jolly by now, but we're not.  We're actually not even near the top of the jolly list.

According to Ruth Whippman, the seeking of happiness (on which Americans are spending billions) is making us "nervous wrecks."  For all the hype and all the pages of ink devoted to increasing our joy, it seems that many of these path-showers are just giving us one more thing to feel guilty about--not being as happy as we ought to be!